City of the Big Shoulders: Polish Steel Workers (Video Transcript)
Between the Great Lakes, the Grand De Tour, and the Grand Prairie, living, lighted skyscrapers stand. Spotting the blue dusk with checkers of yellow, streamers of smoke and silver, parallelograms of night gray watchmen, singing a soft, moaning song. I am a child, a belonging.
The hands of men took hold and tugged, and the breaths of men went into the junk, and the junk stood up into skyscrapers, and asked, who am I? Am I a city? And if I am, what is my name? And once, while the time whistles blew and blew again, the men answered, long ago we gave you a name. Long ago we laughed and said, you, your name is Chicago.
Every year, Chicago holds a folk fair. 80 nationalities live in the city. They’re all invited. The mayor is Richard Daley, an Irishman who has ruled Chicago for over 20 years. The fair was his creation. The people of Chicago are proud of the folk fair. And the mayor shares his city’s pride.
Chicago is a cosmopolitan city made up of many people with their own culture and their own background, and that’s what we think is a great story of Chicago. Because for hundreds of years, many, many people have been coming in here. The Irish and the Germans. And the Croatians and Lithuanians, and Italians. Swedes and Spanish speaking people. All coming into a city for opportunity and for work.
Mayor Daley forgot the largest European group of all, the Poles. 800,000 Poles live in Chicago, more than in any other city in the world, except Warsaw. Nearly a million of them, yet the Poles have never really made their presence felt in a city where they’ve lived for 100 years.
Maybe we’re not boastful enough. Maybe we’re too much like I am. Like I am, just put your head down and blush if they say something. Nice about you. Should say damn right I am. Yeah, I did it. Sure we did it. I think we should do more of it. Palm on the table. Maybe they’ll believe it, or they’ll think different.
Poles were late arrivals to Chicago. Most came at the beginning of the century.
Many Poles came to this country, and they did the menial jobs, they did the hard work. And they’re the people who went out there, and they sweated, and they weren’t afraid to work, and they built up the industry, the stockyard, every type of industry there was a Pole in there doing his bit.
In the 1900s, Chicago was the boom town of America. It began as a military fort in a swamp. Within 80 years, it was a metropolis. A city of two million of the world’s first skyscrapers and world’s largest stockyards, it boasted of having the biggest and best of everything.
Four out of five of its people were new immigrants from Europe, or sons and daughters of immigrants. The first Poles in Chicago clung to their language and their Catholic faith. They wanted to stay together, worship as they always had, so they built their Polish churches, sang their Polish hymns.
[SINGING]
Polonia, their first settlement, was a place to stay Polish, not to become American.
Everybody spoke Polish, even the conductors on the streetcars. And the milkman, the people that delivered ice and packages, everything was in Polish. It was amazing. It was like a little Poland here. The people at that time, my parents, they had a language barrier.
They couldn’t spread out too far or attend colleges, or what to better themselves. Because first of all, the sacrifice they made, it was quite a drain on them physically. And secondly, they had families they had to feed.
[? Precopia ?] and Walter [INAUDIBLE] were both born in Poland. She came to America in 1906, he came in 1912. In Poland, they lived in neighboring villages. They might never have met had thy not come to Chicago.
I met Walter because Walter at one time took my girlfriend and me to the show, and of course, when he, we got out, he says we’ll take the girlfriend home first, and he took me home last. And that’s how we started to date, and then coming around, he’d talk about different places with my folks, what parts of Europe he came from.
Of course Poland, and it was so that he and I were born pretty close by. We belonged, like, in the same county. We were both born there. So that’s how we met here. See, not even knowing that we were from there.
Walter was 14 when he came to Chicago to work in the stockyards. His sister Sophie was nine. Walter and Sophie came to join their father. So had Walter’s wife, [? Precopia. ?] The fathers had worked in Chicago for years to earn the money to bring their families over.
Then when we got to Chicago, my father wasn’t unable to meet us. For some reason, or whether because he works nights and he slept days, so we had no idea how to get here. My mother had the address, but we didn’t know what kind of transportation to take. So there were these enterprising peddlers, you know?
And the guy with the wagon, you know, went around, found where your destination was. And he said he’s going to take you. It’s going to cost you so much and so much. So instead of coming by streetcar or whatever, he got some of us on the wagon, you know? And our luggage and all that, and we sat on the luggage.
It seemed like it took forever from downtown to 43rd and Ashland and as the wagon pulled, you know, the horse pulled, and the kids hopped onto the street and started howling, greenhorns! Greenhorns! Greenhorns!
My father was in bed when we got there. And they had boarders there and they used to sleep in shifts. Those that worked days slept at night, those that worked nights slept days. And the quilt he had was so holey he was all tangled up in it. Do you remember that, Walter?
Yeah, I remember. I was disappointed, because I had a picture, myself, America was cowboys and Indians like they showed in the old country, in the magazines. When I see that, when I came here and the stockyards here, so I was disappointed.
No cowboys, just cows. City stockyards slaughtered and dressed animals from the entire middle west, and canned and shipped them to the world. You didn’t have to know how to read or write, or even speak English. You just had to do hard and monotonous work. And you have to live in the west part of the city.
At that time, everybody burned coal, you know? All the yards, all the slaughterhouses, and all that, and on some days, when the pressure was low, that smoke spread around just like a big cloud. The smell was terrible. When the wind just hit the right direction, why we’d get it in the houses. For a few bloc
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